👋Guys, we’re getting so close to the launch of this beta demo! I know we’ve been saying that a bunch recently, but things take a lot of time. We want to give you as polished of a preview experience as we possibly can, to give you a really good idea of what the final game will be like. And polish takes a ton of time, but it’s coming! Okay, let’s get into it! 🎮
To start, we’ve added the save & load functionality for the levels and the score, for the SFX and music, for the two currencies, Piggy points & Boar Bucks, and also for the cannon settings. This means that all of these things will save when you quit the game, and be automatically loaded when you start up the game again. This is obviously a crucial function to have in any game. It’s just one of the many pivotal things we’ve been adding to the demo.
For the main menu, the 3D level with the waterfall and the Forge, we’ve added a camera system where when you select the “Shop” page of the menu, the camera flies over the river and sits in front of the Forge/Shop where you can choose to customize your Piggies or your cannon. We added a cool whoosh sound that accompanies you as you fly over the river, which sounds really great.
Another thing we added to this level is an entire forge section. This is Dr. Swinestein’s workshop where he creates all of his gadgets, tools, weapons and other trinkets. This section of the level serves as the “Customize” menu background. Where you customize your pigs and cannon. We really like the look of it so far but we’re having trouble with the black outlines effect. The ones on the objects in the forge are interfering with the ones in the rest of the level, making a lot of the objects black. We’re going to continue to work on this and bring you updates in the future.
We’ve been doing a huge amount of work on the Piggy Shop. We’ve set up all of the accessory items that will be available in the demo, we’ve created a list element and the ability to add them to your shopping cart. The store knows how many Piggy Points you have and only allows you to buy them if you have enough. It also subtracts the appropriate number of PP when you buy an item. When you tap an item to look at it, it puts a green check mark in the corner of that item’s tile to show that you have it applied. It also puts that item on your model pig to show you how it looks. The store is a massive project and we have a lot to do on it, but we are making great progress.
We've been trying to market the game more, leading up the the beta demo release. We also plan to look for a publisher for the game. On of our efforts to this end is creating more content. We made a few GIFs of the different mechanics in the game. This is the one for the TNT crates, which now have explosion CFX & SFX!.
We’ve finished the Tutorial that will be in the demo. We really wanted to have a minimalist tutorial system, so what we did is we have graphics that appear on the screen before launch that have arrows pointing at the different level mechanics and UI elements and some text explaining them. Once you launch, all of the tutorial graphics disappear. It really feels smooth and clean. We hope you think so too!
We’ve started work on the complex camera system in the main part of the game where you bounce the pigs around. The camera must have two functions. It follows the pig around in a very specific way, so it doesn’t move every time the pig bounces, in order to not make the players sick, and it also functions as a parallax background camera. The different layers/depths of the background move at different rates relative to the pig to show the different distances at which these layers exist behind the pig. This is a very complicated system and we’ve only begun to work on it. We’ll keep you updated as we progress!
We’ve overhauled the 3D main menu level with all new better-looking trees, rocks, stumps, logs, flowers and more. We also created some nice stylized wind effects coming off of the waterfall and river. We like to add little moving components to the level to bring it to life.
We’ve been setting up the data table, enumerator and blueprints to enable the players of the Piggy beta demo to be able to buy accessories for their pig. For this demo, players will have one pet pig and one playable pig which will automatically wear whatever you put on your pet pig. In the future, players will have multiple pet pigs to deck out in the drippest threads and bling, but their main pig will be the one who puts in work (the playable pig). All of the ‘extra pigs’ you earn will be this exact pig for simplicity’s sake.
We’ve also begun testing the 8 playable levels for the demo, making sure everything runs smoothly and all of the mechanics and systems are working correctly. This is also so we can come up with an accurate point threshold for each level. We need to make it difficult for the players to beat the level with three pigs, but not impossible.
We just hired a new character artist and an animator for the characters in the game. But for the characters we do have (the first pig and the big red bird, Bubba), we created an idle animation for him and set him up so each instance of him plays this animation starting at a different time. So now, every instance of Bubba is dancing around like a nerd and we think it’s marvellous!
Like we’ve been saying, a lot of the work leading up to this beta demo is little minor fixes. We had to fix the origins on some of the jewelry pieces due to a mistake in Blender, we changed the SFX that plays when you tap the gear icon (settings) to a better one, but we realized the sound was playing in two places, so we fixed that.
That’s pretty much it for this round, friends. We’re so happy to those of you who are tuning in and reading our updates. Your support means more to us than you probably realize. We will keep working our curly tails off to bring you this beta demo as soon as we can.
Video games teach the value of persistence and resilience by presenting challenging levels or obstacles that require repeated attempts to overcome. They encourage us to keep trying, learn from failures, adapt strategies, and ultimately succeed through perseverance. This lesson translates to real life, emphasizing the importance of resilience when facing setbacks or difficulties.
This is a very exciting upcoming indie game!
🔗| Website: https://www.dangerousmindgames.com/piggy-payback-1
🔗| Discord: https://discord.gg/heZcBD9Y
🔗| LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/dangerousmind.games
🔗| Piggy Payback! Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5o297mlA98&list=PLEHiM_uUvTU6PwieL38UbYgUhfXrlC2PV